I just started Anna Kerenina by Leo Tolstoy. I’m pretty sure I read this in college, but I may be getting Tolstoy mixed up with Kafka. Hmm, who wrote about the kid who turned into a giant cochroach again? For the last year or so I’ve been on a sci-fi kick. I’ve grown a bit tired of it and was craving something different.
Walking around Barnes and Noble I saw Anna Kerenina and was put off initially by the giant Oprah’s Book Club sash wrapped around it. You’ve got to hand it to Oprah though – she’s inspired untold bajillions of people to read who would otherwise being watching, um, The Oprah show. Anyway, I’ve read a few of the books on her list like She’s Come Undone, Midwives, The Reader, The Poisonwood Bible, House of Sand and Fog, A Lesson Before Dying, East of Eden, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Some more recently than others. Some as much as 15 years ago. I find the selections Oprah chooses to sometimes be depressing or hard to get through. She’s Come Undone made me want to put my head into a nice gastastic oven. On the other hand I liked House of Sand and Fog and I love Steinbeck.
This new version of Anna Kerenina appears to be a new translation and is getting good reviews. It’s like 800 pages long so it’s going to take me a while to read. At least a week 
. I hope it’s more exciting than Moby Dick. I read that one summer when I was like, um, much younger, just for the hell of it and it bored the frickin’ bajesus out of me. I learned more about whale fat (and since forgotten) than one really needs to know. Greatest novel of all time!? I’ve got your greatest novel of all time right here pal! That’s two months of my life I’ll never get back! I could have been reading the rest of my Hardy Boys collection!
Anyway, I’ll let you know how it goes. Should be fun.
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lol. Dick is reading "Moby Dick" right now!
LOL. No way! Watch, he’ll probably love it.
Anna Karenina is a great book. Be forewarned that there are many long, tedious sections–especially those concerning the various social gatherings of the nobility—to plow through. The amazing thing is that by the end of the book, you suddenly realize why Tolstoy put all of that stuff in there, as it’s essential to the point he’s trying to make. It’s a long read but definitely worth it!
Ah, as Rob points out, Toltstoy seems to fascinated with long sections detailing social gatherings (e.g. the first 300 pages of War and Peace–another good one if you can last through several hundred pages). You might want to give Kafka another shot, I believe Barnes and Nobles has a collection of his stories for super cheap. (Also cheap, Drover Thrift Classics… out of copyright literature for under $2).
I recommend Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow for a couple-hundred pages of a weird WWII story. It was written in the mid-70s, ever evident as soon as you get to the story of adventures of toilet travels and wormwood binges. I felt it was Battle of the Bulge meets Clockwork Orange.